SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Havoc. If you’ve yet to experience the new Tom Hardy movie, please go back and watch it with your Netflix subscription.
After waiting YEARS for Tom Hardy’s Havoc, I finally watched the 2025 Netflix movie when it dropped on the streaming platform in April. And boy, was it worth the way. A massive fan of director Gareth Evans’ body of work (he’s the guy behind The Raid and The Raid 2), this is one of the big action movies this year that was at the top of my list. And man, it was awesome.
Between its story about an embattled cop trying to do the right thing for once and protect the son of a powerful real estate tycoon framed for murder, the outrageously talented cast that also includes Timothy Olyphant, Jessie Mei Li, and Quellen Sepulveda, the latter in breakout roles, and some of the best fight scenes I’ve seen in over a decade, this movie had it all. And while there are gnarly deaths throughout the movie, one that had my wife and me gasping (and laughing) in disgust and pure joy. Yeah, it was something.
Like Gareth Evans' Other Movies, Havoc Doesn't Hold Back With The Gnarly Deaths
If you’ve seen Gareth Evans’ movies like The Raid, Merantau, or The Apostle, his brutal 2018 Netflix movie, then you’re aware of the filmmaker's ability to craft and shoot outstanding and extremely violent fight scenes, shootouts, and character deaths. And that’s no different in Havoc.
From the time we first meet Tom Hardy’s Patrick Walker until the final moments of the film’s ambiguous ending, so many people get killed in a variety of ways. People get shot, people get stabbed, and people get thrown off balconies (that club scene from the Havoc teaser is the stuff of wonder). With kills that make the John Wick movies look like PG-13 action flicks, Evans turned the gruesome factor up several notches with this one.
But The Scene Where Tom Hardy's Character Kills The Assassin Had My Wife And Me Howling
The scene that stands out over the rest and had my wife and me howling was the moment Patrick Walker shoots The Assassin (Michelle Waterson-Gomez) through the face with a harpoon gun. Throughout this entire fight, which takes place during the Triads’ raid on Patrick’s cabin hideout, I kept wondering how this mostly silent and deadly character would meet her end. And then it came…
It’s not just the fact that the spear went through her face, but more so the fact that it got stuck in the ceiling and was still attached to the gun through a cable, which was now holding the assassin up. The way she slides down and loses her footing looked so realistic, so violent, so visceral. We laughed, we gagged, we yelled “holy shit!”
I Think It Was A Combination Of The Randomness And Sheer Brutality That Made It So Memorable
Thinking back on the scene, there are a few reasons why this particular death is so memorable (and gross). While most of the other major deaths in the movie happen rather quickly, this one is slow, grotesque, and unsettling to say the least. Combine that with the randomness of it (the shot pretty much comes out of nowhere) and the sheer brutality of how The Assassin goes out, you have yourself an iconic movie moment. It’s the “virtuastic violence” that critics have noted while praising the movie. And it works!
Though some things that don’t work in Havoc, this absolutely brutal death scene is not one of them. In fact, most of the kills in this two-hour action flick work really, really well.
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